Moving On

Hi! Thank you for visiting this blog again.

I acknowledge that I have not updated this blog since March 2006, and since it is now March 2008, it is an exact 2-year period.

The initial passion I had in creating and updating this blog fizzled off in less than a 9-month period. Many factors were at play: being caught up in the busy-ness of life, planning & executing my wedding (Dec 2006), challenges at work followed by a change of job, procrastination, and much soul-searching that led to a total change of perspective of how I viewed life.

This blog ends here and now. If you know me, you know how/where to reach me. When I have a new, active blog again, I will post the link here for you to follow up with my life.

Signing off,
Ai Jou

Long absence

I haven't blogged for a very, very long time.

Perhaps it was just a passing fad that I jumped into just because others were doing it.

Most of the time, if I'm not working, I'm out running errands (lots of them!), doing chores or spending time with Des, my friends and family. If I had any free time at home, I preferred to spend it relaxing with a good book, the newspaper or staring at the tube.

Well, I guess you can also throw in the fact that I don't have access to the computer as much as I'd like to. The home PC's mostly hogged by my brother with his computer games, and if I do get to use it, I'd prefer to clear my every-increasing email inbox.

Don't be mistaken, I missed blogging. I miss expressing myself with words to no one in particular. Every week or so, I think about blogging. But that's all, I just THINK about it, I never get around to it. I think too much, about what I should write, what I should express. I think to myself, nothing interesting ever happens to me. And sometimes I couldn't allow the words to just flow naturally. It had to be a planned article, something nice to read, beneficial to myself and others.

Well, I am back. I won't think, I'll just blog.

See you soon!

I'm So Blessed

I apologise for not writing recently.

Life's been the usual... work has been 'streesful' as we go for the final league in meeting clients and getting them to sign up ads in my company's publications; we've also been planning big time for our postgrad fair next year. I've been continuing with the room decorating but it's coming along slow as I don't have much time leftover after work or during weekends.

What's been significant is the metta (loving-kindness) discussion group that I've started attending under Bro Hor Tuck Loon's tutelage. It's related to the vipassana (insight) meditation group that I attended under him but it's a different concept altogether.

In this group, we learn about love. How to love ourself, how to love others close to us, how to love our enemies, how to love people we don't know and how to love all beings.

Did you know that we have to love ourself first before we can love others? I've discovered that I don't love myself enough as I don't feel that I'm good enough. And because of that, I often reject love that's coming from others. Not just from men or guys, but from my parents, good friends and teachers.

It's a challenge to love myself, warts and all. But this is the first step towards unconditional love - loving someone (or ourself) without any conditions attached, to love whole-ly and completely.

I hope to be able to experience and practise unconditional love in my heart one day.

Raya Holidays 2005

Deepavali was on 1 Nov while Hari Raya Puasa was on 3 & 4 Nov. So I took leave on Wednesday, 2 Nov and thus got a long stretch of 6 days holiday including the weekends!

Want to know what I did during the holidays?



Out with the old, in with the new
With the help of Des and my family, we embarked on the largest spring cleaning project we've ever attempted in my room. We moved 1 large bookcase with glass doors, 1 small bookcase, 1 colour box, 1 large study table and 1 small wardrobe out of my room. With that, countless papers, files, books, and other miscelleanous junk went to the recycle and trash bins. We even gave away our whole set of World Book Encyclopedia that we bought in the 90s!

It wasn't an easy task moving and squeezing the furniture out from my room, but we did it! Of course, my Mum, Dad, brother and I had minor arguments with one another on what to keep and what to throw/recycle from my room.

Mum loves her old sewing machine - a gift from her mother - even though it doesn't work properly any more. My brother was attached to the encyclopedia set because it used to be his only source of entertainment before computer games & the internet. My father's attached to every single piece of furniture that we had.

Our neighbours are some Indonesian factory workers who rented the unit, so they gladly picked up some of the hand-me-down furniture, no matter how battered they looked.

Miraculously, the cleaning bug hit my dad as well. We were going at the spring cleaning for 3 days in a row while he sat back, watched Astro channels and practised his music, till on the 4th day, he too decided to clear out some of the old books, papers and junk he stores in his room. And the reason? So that he could reuse some of the old furniture that I was planning to move out from my room. Better yet, having not enough space to organise his stuff, he went and bought himself a ceiling-high bookcase from Carrefour.

Yes, I live with a family of hoarders, and I am one myself.

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It was hard for me to let go of some of the stuff I had accumulated - old letters from pen-pals in the early 90s, soft toys and cute presents given by friends, birthday and festival cards from school friends, my old study notes and mind maps from university days (all painstakingly handwritten and drawn with colour pens), and even all my report cards dating back to kindergarten!

I'm a sentimental soul.

But with my boyfriend's help, I just closed my eyes and threw all of them away. It's not that I do not cherish them and wish to keep them, but my room (which I share with my brother) has absolutely no more space to accomodate all these stuff!

After I graduated from university and started working, I've amassed a fairly good collection of clothes, shoes, handbags, magazines, novels, and music CDs. My poor 98 sq ft room just didn't have the space to house them all together with my old sentimentalities. Sooner or later, they just had to go.

Storing, arranging & packing
So far, I've only moved in a new table-cum-bookshelf from Ikea. I'm still waiting for my new 4-ft wardrobe that's coming tomorrow (they weren't working during the Raya holidays). It's beige with sliding doors, and it's twice as large as my old one. Also, we plan to get a new bookcase for all my novels, magazines and other useful books.

Even with the moving in of these 3 new furniture, the room will still look relatively neat ('cause I bought lotsa storage boxes to store things) and a more spacious room arrangement. The trick is in organising your stuff and buying the right furniture!

My brother has also got a new 4-ft wardrobe and wall-mounted bookshelf. He claims his worldly possesions occupied only 1/3 of the stuff in our room. Well, I beg to differ cause I helped him throw away a lot of his old college notes, books and other stuff that I found in our old bookcase while he was away in Cameron Highlands for 3 days... *Shhh!* Don't tell him!

When it's all in, and my room's all spick and span, I think I'll post up a photo for you guys to see!

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The famous education & careers adviser, doctorjob, wishes you 'Happy Deepavali' and 'Selamat HARI RAYA Aidilfitri'!

* Deepavali: Festival of lights celebrated by the Hindus
** Hari Raya Puasa: A Muslim celebration after a month of fasting during the Islamic month of Ramadhan